Jared Kushner – is President Trump’s son-in-law. And the weakest ideological link in the Family Trump – to be sure:

“Already, the Trump administration has sought to ease data-sharing rules and assure health data companies they won’t be penalized for sharing information with state and federal officials — a move driven in part by Kushner’s push to assemble the national network, according to an individual with knowledge of the decision.

“‘This is a genuine crisis — we have to work through it and do our best to protect people’s health,’ said Jessica Rich, a former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection bureau. ‘But doing that doesn’t mean we have to destroy privacy.’”

“(I)n an age in which we all carry a device that tracks our movements, contact tracing can now be done remotely with scarcely any manpower required.

“And because those devices are built by competent private entities, not the federal garbage-bag government, this form of contact tracing is likely to work….

“The only catch is that it means granting two of the world’s tech behemoths minute-by-minute updates on our movements *and* our health status.

“And, in so doing, triggering a cultural shift in which we’ll all be less reluctant to provide information like that to authorities forever after….

“(T)hey’re going to build (the tracking system) right into the iOS and Android operating systems while providing some sort of option to opt out. That’ll deliver the software to three billion people or so.

“An obvious early question: How thorough will the ‘opt out’ be, exactly?

“Given how much personal information is collected surreptitiously by tech companies already, it’s impossible to believe that the movements of opt-outs won’t be quietly tracked too.

“The ‘opt out’ might prevent you from being alerted if someone you’ve been in contact with is sick, but no one wants to opt out of that part.

“It’s the movement tracking to which some will object. Is that realistically preventable once it’s built into the OS?

“Is there any doubt that eventually the default setting on contact tracing will be to turn it on and force users to turn it off?”

ALL of this – is a GIANT No.

Of course, Big Government and Big Tech are all operating in a legal No Man’s Land – because the federal government still hasn’t passed pertinent privacy legislation.

“As the Senate Commerce panel prepares to bring in tech and telecom officials for a hearing next week on consumer privacy, Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) has suggested Congress should legislate. That would be welcome to many tech and telecom heavyweights wary of a patchwork of state privacy rules….”

“The bill would require large-scale internet platforms that collect data from more than 1 million users and gross more than $50 million per year to provide greater transparency to consumers and allow users to view content that has not been curated as a result of a secret algorithm.

“The Filter Bubble Transparency Act would make it easier for internet platform users to understand the potential manipulation that exists with secret algorithms and require large-scale platforms to allow those users to consume information outside of that potential manipulation zone or ‘filter bubble.’”

The bill is good – because it’s good. And because it’s federal.

And because unlike many of the state laws – it doesn’t abuse the daylight out of Internet Service Providers (ISPs)…while leaving HUGE data abusers Big Tech (Google, Facebook,…) entirely alone.

It delineates privacy lines wisely – and for everyone equally.

And it will begin to rein in all of the titanic nonsense we are currently experiencing.